In reply to Nollind Whachell.

There's no need for WordPress itself to replicate the features in Tumblr. The developers only need to build the features they need into plugins/themes.

I don't see anything mentioned that is not possible to create on top of WordPress. Featured media only needs an ID or URL stored as post meta or just auto-pulling them from the content itself. Masonry grids require loading one of many available JS libraries and hooking it to a block class. These would definitely make for some cool tutorials. :)

Maybe some of this will be baked directly into core WP at some point, but it's not necessary in order to recreate the functionality on Tumblr or any other WP site.